


baby don't hurt me

by softlyblue



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Pining, Slow Burn, impressionism, read it, u know what. its fucking stupid oscar wilde gives aziraphale relationship advice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2020-09-28 13:51:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20427032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softlyblue/pseuds/softlyblue
Summary: L’homme Distrait is a painting in the corner of the room, below a collection of Renoir’s studies of water. People’s eyes pass over it, oddly put off, although there isn’t much wrong with it. At first, anyway.It is by a young man named Alfred Sisley, and it is odd because Sisley is known (already) for his landscapes. It is a very small canvas, all light and the spill of shadow,  the press of a hand against a pillow, the fall of hair along bare shoulders, a shirt slipped down to cup the upper arm, to reveal a smattering of intimate freckles along the back of the neck, trailing ever-downwards. Morning sun spills through the window the figure looks out of, and his face is hidden by the picture, captured from behind. His fingertips press into the pillow, clutching a little of the fabric, and what little the viewer can see below him shows bare feet tucked underneath bare legs, a tantalising peek at whatever else might lie beneath. It is tender.





	baby don't hurt me

**Author's Note:**

> hello my friends! i have some things to say - firstly, i did as much research as i cld but some things are... not as accurate as i would like. secondly, this is based on that one line in the book when crowley says he slept for most of the 19th century. thirdly, oscar wilde is here bc i love him. 
> 
> i hope you enjoy this as much as i did!

** _30th April 1876, Paris_ **

Very little from the exhibition actually sells, because this is before they are very much in vogue, and Manet is still young with a spring in his step, and Renoir still follows Monet with hope in his eyes and a brush behind his ear. It is 1876, the second Impressionist exhibit in Nadar’s studio, and they are all young and full of vigour, skin so thick as to shrug off criticism because  _ what would they know?  _

_ L’homme Distrait  _ is a painting in the corner of the room, below a collection of Renoir’s studies of water. People’s eyes pass over it, oddly put off, although there isn’t much wrong with it. At first, anyway.

It is by a young man named Alfred Sisley, and it is odd because Sisley is known (already) for his landscapes. It is a very small canvas, all light and the spill of shadow, the press of a hand against a pillow, the fall of hair along bare shoulders, a shirt slipped down to cup the upper arm, to reveal a smattering of intimate freckles along the back of the neck, trailing ever-downwards. Morning sun spills through the window the figure looks out of, and his face is hidden by the picture, captured from behind. His fingertips press into the pillow, clutching a little of the fabric, and what little the viewer can see below him shows bare feet tucked underneath bare legs, a tantalising peek at whatever else might lie beneath. It is tender. 

Three paintings are sold, at the second Impressionist exhibit, although the publicity is a lot greater than that of the second. Two are sold to an art collector from Normandy, who has felt the way the wind is blowing - 

And the third is sold to the strange man in the old-fashioned suits, who came every day of the exhibition to stare at the Sisley painting in the corner, an odd look of yearning in his eyes, his hands neatly tucked behind his back as though he doesn’t trust himself not to touch. He pays in cash and vanishes. 

☼

** _2nd September 1889, London_ **

Aziraphale does not have many houseguests, but he makes an exception for a few of his favourite people. It is just before the decade turns, and Oscar cuts a pompous figure lying on his chaise-longue with a wine glass hanging from his hand, but he’s a lonely soul and his young man - his Alfred, an undergraduate at Oxford just turned twenty - is chasing him. Oscar comes to Aziraphale to complain, wryly, that young men will chase without any of the idea the hurt they can cause, and Aziraphale is there with wine and an ear to lend. 

“That painting,” Wilde says, waving a hand at the corner, “Often I’ve wondered about it. My tongue is too loose, but my friend - yours is too tight.”

Aziraphale doesn’t have to turn to know which painting Wilde refers to; over the years, he’s wondered if he should discard it, but every time he tries to his hand stills. “I found it in the Impressionists,” he says lightly. “A trifling thing.”

“An odd choice of subject matter for the air-silly men, surely,” Wilde says. He can be astute when he wants to be, damn the bastard. 

Aziraphale shrugs. “I thought it was unique, and Sisley was only too glad to sell.”

“Do you know who the sitter is?”

“No,” Aziraphale says. 

Oscar’s eyes, mostly full of self-pity, swell with gentle laughter. “My friend - you never did learn how to lie.”

“I don’t  _ know  _ him,” Aziraphale says, “I - I know his name.”

“Oh?” 

Aziraphale fills his glass, and then Oscar’s when he holds it out. “His name is Anthony,” he says steadily, and wills his voice not to tremble overmuch, “But we have - that is to say, I do not see him anymore. I haven’t in a long time. I saw the painting at the exhibition and it seemed like I ought to buy it, although I never told Sisley my name and I cannot imagine Anthony would be too happy to know I bought it.”

Wilde laughs. It isn’t a very happy laugh. “You and I,” he says, and tips the edge of his glass against Aziraphale’s, “Must be the most miserable men in all of England. Our lovers run away.”

Aziraphale doesn’t disagree. 

☼

** _And On The Seventh Day, He Rested_ **

That is not even  _ close  _ to how it begins, but it is a view of things from the other side of the mirror. 

Crowley doesn’t remember his life before the Fall, only that he must have had one, and that he must have had a good reason for leaving Above and going Below. He remembers the pain of it, of everything burning and the feathers on his wings scorching black with the heat, a God angry at the rejection of one of Its children. Crowley remembers screaming, and then blackness, and then Hell. 

He hadn’t liked Hell at all. When they asked for volunteers to tempt on this new experiment God was creating, Crowley had jumped at the chance, back when he was still just Crawly and nothing much separated him from all the rest of the poor bastards down there who had just wanted to know  _ why.  _

And he got up there and found out that the world was open and airy and beautiful, and things smelled of peaches, and Eve was nice to him, stroking a finger along his scaly back. “You’re pretty,” she tells him now. 

This is how it begins. 

“I will call you a snake,” Eve tells him, and Crawly rears up all proud of himself, because he has a name someone else has given him and it seems to fit him as though it always has. Like a glove. “You are a snake because of the hiss you make.”

To make her happy, Crawly does it. 

Her laugh is beautiful, and he is proud of himself for making it - that is something he has done himself, created all on his own, and it feels so good to create joy in the air, especially for Eve. Crawly likes her ever so much more than he likes Adam, who is a bullyish man, stomping about the garden and forcing names on things that don’t suit them at all. A part of Crawly wonders if Adam will be happy about  _ snake.  _

“Hello.”

It is a few days later, and Crawly is testing out his  _ other  _ form, sitting on the wall of the garden and swinging his legs over the side. He’s eating an apple. It’s green, juicy, running down his chin, full of good flavour and a sharp bite, and this is why he volunteered - because there are no apples in Hell. 

“Hello,” something says again, and a vision all in white settles beside Crawly. 

Crawly scrunches up his nose. “What are  _ you  _ doing here?”

“I’m a Principality,” says the angel, almost apologetically. “I think I’m meant to be guarding Eden from temptation and things like that? It’s all quite exciting. I’ve been speaking to Adam, a lot.”

“Good,” Crawly tosses his apple over the wall, where it rolls into the barren sand. 

(And why is Eden the only place of life? What has made it special?)

(Something takes root.) 

“You’re the temptation, then, I gather,” says the angel. He is quite pretty, objectively, a spray of short white hair over an amicable face, a sharp little nose and bow-shaped lips. His robes fall to his ankles, suitably demure, and his hands are folded in his lap as though he’s awaiting a lecture from God Itself. 

Crawly shrugs, and feels very sinful. “I’m the temptation.”

(Later he thinks this is part of the Holy Punishment. It must be. To love, and to never be loved in return - a black hole, a void in reverse, giving and giving and never receiving. This is the last and first joke, by a God cruel enough to laugh at it, placing the one thing Crowley wants in front of him and saying:  _ this is not for you.)  _

“You look very benign,” the angel says, like an apology. “I - oh! I’m very sorry. I’m Aziraphale, Principality. Your name can’t just be  _ temptation.”  _

“Crawly,” Crawly says, going scarlet at the saying of it aloud. “Although I’m thinking of changing it.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you,” says Aziraphale politely, and Crawly thinks  _ oh so this is what it’s like to see the sun rising.  _

He doesn’t mean to tempt. 

Truly, he doesn’t. 

“Oh, snake,” whispers Eve one golden night when the sun is hanging over the sky, a guest that refuses to leave, “I am so sad, and I don’t know why. I wish you could speak to me, snake - sometimes it feels like you’re my only friend.”

Her and Adam sleep at opposite ends of the Garden. Eve curls beneath a bush, her hair bouncing over one breast, and shivers in the cold; she has nothing to clothe herself in, and even in the desert the nights are freezing. Crawly can’t imagine surviving with warm blood in his veins, instead. 

_ You are my dearesssst friend,  _ Crawly hisses, his tongue flickering out to brush against her cheek. He can’t help it - and anyway, Hell would tell him if he was doing anything truly wrong. Right. 

“He hurts me so,” Eve says. Water pools underneath her pupils, and spills over her cheeks, and when Crawly bumps his nose against it he tastes warm salt. “I wish he didn’t, snake, but he does, and he expects me to forget and be his wife.  _ Loving.  _ I love him, and he says he loves me!”

_ Love is cruel,  _ Crawly says to ears that cannot hear him. As though he knows anything. 

“But if he loved me he would be kind.”

Crawly is silent, but his eyes are drawn to the tree in the centre of the garden, and he wonders… all he wants to do is help. 

“I wish I knew! For good or ill, I wish I knew!”

And Crawly wraps around her shoulders, and whispers in her ear, and Eve hears. 

They leave soon after that. 

But Aziraphale gives them the flaming sword, and surely that must count for something? Something meant for good will turn out badly, but something meant for good might still work the way it was intended. 

Crawly leaves, belly flat in the sand, and behind him an apple tree takes root, and a single Principality takes flight, dove’s wings in the burning blue of a sky too new to be clouded. 

☼

** _Summer 1194 BC, Troy_ **

The funeral is solemn. The sight of the pyre, hot and sticky in the air of summer, makes bile rise in the back of Crowley’s throat, although he hides under the wraps of a mourning widow in the crowd, unseen to most everyone - he doesn’t want to be bothered, doesn’t want to be talked to. 

What a  _ fucking  _ waste. 

He is present at the council, too. 

“The boy asked for his ashes to be mixed with-”

“But that’s it. He is just a boy, and a  _ war hero,  _ and that other-”

Crowley adds his voice to the chorus. “Achilles is a hero,” he says roughly, dressed now as a war general and not a widow, “And a hero deserves to have his last wishes honoured, does he not? Come to your senses! Would any of you,  _ any of you,  _ wish to be buried in a way not of your choosing?”

For a brief second he holds the sway of these powerful men, men who have grown powerful by getting rid of the caring. He can see them considering. But - 

“Achilles was a war hero,” says someone roughly, in a voice much stronger and less stricken than Crowley’s, “And Patroclus was nothing but a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was Achilles’ one blind spot, and we can forgive the man, but we cannot let this continue past his death. Patroclus was a murderer.”

“Let them be,” Crowley says, one last attempt, “Let them be.”

He is shouted down. 

“Hello,” Aziraphale says softly.

Crowley is sitting by the seashore, already deep into his cups with no sign and no intention of slowing down yet. “Hello, angel,” he says gloomily. “Come to gloat?”

To his surprise, Aziraphale sits down beside him, rather heavily. The two of them tend to avoid each other, still, even with all the awkward camaraderie of the ark and the garden and the following the Israelites around their sorry mission - Crowley just can’t get past it, somehow, the way Aziraphale looks. The way he moves. The way it strikes a yearning in his heart. 

“Gloat?” Aziraphale sounds injured at the very thought of it. “I thought - I thought they would let them rest. They were so young.”

Wordlessly, Crowley passes the wine over. “It was Pyrrhus, in the end, who swayed them. I think he was embarrassed by it all. Patroclus-”

“They were in love,” Aziraphale says softly. 

Crowley looks across, although he tries not to. 

(When he meets Aziraphale, he tries always to look away, because the sight of the angel brings him such unbearable pain, deep down in his heart where he can’t heal it away. Aziraphale is always ringed in a peculiar light that doesn’t glow, as though Crowley’s eyes can see what Crowley often forgets; that Aziraphale is a heavenly body, and Crowley is not.)

Aziraphale is dressed like a foot soldier resting, half in uniform and half out, his undertunic white, a little smeared with sand. His hair is the same as it always was, because he doesn’t seem inclined to change as much as Crowley does, and the straps of his sandals are done a little messy. He is crying big, fat, ugly blobs down his cheeks, two streams meeting at his chin and dripping off to plop on his hands. “They were in love,” he says again, “They didn’t  _ deserve  _ it.”

“Oh, Aziraphale,” Crowley says. He tries to say something else, and then stops. 

Aziraphale passes back the wine. “They didn’t deserve it.”

“Deserving has nothing to do with anything,” Crowley says before he can stop himself, “Nobody  _ deserves  _ what they’re given. You should know that by now.”

Oh, and does he feel like a heel when Aziraphale turns blue-stained eyes on him. “How can you say that!”

“All those people who drowned to make a new world. Those children, those babies,” and Crowley is only letting himself say this because he’s drunk and bitter, “All those people who died for Its purpose - did they deserve to drown? Did Noah deserve to live? Does Pyrrhus deserve to continue when Achilles is gone? Did Patroclus deserve to die? None of it has to do with who deserves anything. It’s all a  _ game,  _ angel, and all we are is another pair of playing dice.”

“You don’t believe that,” Aziraphale says. He sounds hurt, beyond hurt. 

Crowley digs his fingers into the sand. “I have to believe that,” he says. “Because if Achilles deserved to die, if Patroclus deserved to die, for  _ nothing  _ \- just for being in love - then nobody deserves to live at all.”

“Crowley-”

He’s done talking. He doesn’t want to talk about love with Aziraphale, on a beach, the smell of burning body drifting down the wind, Patroclus trapped and Achilles sent to the heavens, Troy falling and soldiers revelling. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he says, and perhaps he sounds so small that Aziraphale listens. 

Although they only have one jar, the wine never runs empty, not until the sun rises and Crowley turns beside him and sees only marks in the sand where an angel should be. 

☼

** _Autumn 570 BC, the Leucadian Cliffs _ **

The woman on the cliff is a small, white-haired, bent-over lady, who holds herself with the poise of a woman who knows she was once beautiful beyond compare. She does not cry. 

Crowley is here, but Aziraphale he hasn’t seen in almost a century. 

“My love,” she says to him. “I miss you ever more by the day.”

Crowley reaches out, grabs her by the shoulder; in this body, a young woman from Lesbos itself, the strongest thing about him is the red of his hair. His translucent hand goes right through her. “Please, my love,” he says, in a voice high and flute-like. “Don’t do this.”

Sappho smiles at him sadly. “You are but a ghost,” she tells him. “The ghost of my one love. Claudia - Claudia. When I die I will see her in Hades, and that will be more gift than this - this  _ existence  _ on a rock.”

“Please,” Crowley says again. 

(He has been discorporated for the last five years, the female body he liked so much, killed by a lingering disease, but he hasn’t yet had the courage to go Below to ask for a new body. And so here he is, hanging around the woman who fell in love with him, avoiding the angel he’s fallen in love with by a haunting. He wishes he couldn’t. He wishes she wouldn’t.)

“My Claudia didn’t love me, truly,” Sappho says. She’s still beautiful now, and Crowley sees her as the small, vibrant woman she was and is - black hair wrapping around her waist, blue eyes strong and seeking. “My Claudia loved another, but she never would tell me who. Would you tell me, spirit? Before I die?”

“I’ve given my heart to an angel,” Crowley confesses. The sea hits the rocks below, and almost drowns him out. “Please-”

“And the angel is well deserving of it,” Sappho says. 

She doesn’t scream, on the way down. She only smiles. 

Is  _ this  _ what Crowley deserves?

☼

** _21st April 33AD, Golgotha _ **

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says. 

“We have to stop meeting like this,” Crowley replies, and it should be a joke but John is sobbing on the grassless ground and Aziraphale’s bottom lip is wobbling and all he can hear is Mary wailing for her son.  _ Her  _ son. Not anybody else’s. What’s the point in a father that never shows up?

Aziraphale’s hand touches his arm, and Crowley tries not to startle; instead, he turns his palm up, and Aziraphale’s falling fingers touch Crowley’s, and then their hands are linked without either of them quite knowing why. 

Crowley doesn’t let go. Neither does Aziraphale. 

“I tried, you know,” Aziraphale says dazedly. “I think it was the wrong thing for me to do - but I met him in the desert, just before he came here, and I told him he could have all his Father’s love if he just - if he didn’t-”

“Ineffable,” Crowley says, voice dull. “I met him in the garden. I told him not to do it. I told him he could have the world, he could have John if he wanted, and he said he couldn’t. I tried.”

Three years ago, and Crowley is in the crowd, when Jesus meets John, and just as the clouds part for the dove he sees Aziraphale on the other side of the river. Aziraphale smiles at him, a look altogether too fond although they  _ have  _ been working more together these days, less likely to fall apart, and John touches Jesus very gently, as though he might break. 

“My lord,” he says. 

“Aziraphale,” Crowley says, on the other side of the river now as though he’d always been there, and if he speaks in the same tone as John he prays (hah) that nobody notices. 

Aziraphale is smiling. “They’ve found each other, Crowley! I always knew they would. Oh - oh, it can’t go wrong. He’s the one, you see?”

John follows Jesus through Israel, and Crowley and Aziraphale follow in turn, part of the faceless crowd that grows every time Jesus goes to speak. He preaches on mountains, on boats, in towns, in villages, by wells, in the countryside, by grass that no longer grows, and John supports him and helps helps baptise the converted and Crowley watches him fall in love. It is beautiful to watch. 

They collect the forgotten, on the way. Peter, skinny and young and growling in displeasure; James and the other John, fishing boys who drop their nets, Phillip, Thomas, Matthew, the other James… Thaddeus, Simon, Bartholomew. All too small, all too young, all full of fervent faith. He and Aziraphale meet often, in this time. 

It feels like the end of the world is coming. 

“John loves him,” Crowley says. They’re sitting on the top of an inn where Jesus is preaching, on the roof where nobody will disturb them. 

Aziraphale is eating olives very daintily, his lips wrapped around each one. He looks divine. “Jesus loves him too, I’m sure,” he says like he’s never had cause to doubt it, “They pair of them are - well. Made to be together. I was speaking to John in the last house they were at, and I’m glad for him. I think Jesus feels the strain.”

Crowley relaxes, looks into the starry sky. John loves Jesus. Jesus, the Christ Child. John, the man. “They seem very happy. That can’t last.”

“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale sounds so disapproving, “I do wish you weren’t such a cynic about love.”

_ I’m not,  _ Crowley thinks. “I’m not,” he says. 

Aziraphale laughs and pats Crowley’s knee, a single spot of burning warmth. “You always have been, my dear, ever since I’ve known you.”

_ I’m trying to convince myself, not the rest of the world.  _

Crowley doesn’t say that bit out loud. 

And Judas comes later, the youngest of them all, sixteen and wary, round brown eyes under curly hair, robes that don’t reach his ankles and feet dusty with dirt that isn’t ever properly washed. Crowley sees him and thinks  _ you poor child,  _ and he sees in the way Judas looks at Jesus that there is love, too, with no hope of ever being returned. 

John the Baptist kisses the Emmanuel under a fig tree by moonlight, with Aziraphale and Crowley the sole watchers, strolling along the gardens. “Oh,” Aziraphale says softly. 

Crowley wonders what it is like to do that - to do as John does. Cup his lover by the cheek, a thumb under the jaw, tip the face up so lips can meet, eyes brushing shut and eyelashes tangling, hair mussed, robes slipping from their fastenings, the sounds of two young people in love drifting over the air. 

He looks at Aziraphale, and wonders if he’s thinking the same thing. 

Judas finds nobody, in all their three years of wandering. Crowley wills him to, most desperately.  _ Love is not what you think it is,  _ he tries to say without saying, but Judas doesn’t want to hear. 

Which brings them to this hilltop, this place, John beating his fists against the ground and weeping apologies to a God who planned this all along. 

“We both tried to do the same thing,” Aziraphale says, as though in a daze. “I wonder - does that make me good, or you evil? Is this the good outcome?”

“You cannot look at this and tell me this is good,” Crowley snaps. 

On the cross, Jesus has long since stopped making noise, and the sight of his body makes Crowley feel a little sick. Surely one human shouldn’t have that much blood in them; surely one human shouldn’t look so twisted, so wrong. The thorns have torn the skin on his scalp, and the blood has run down his face, down his cheeks, like some sort of awful parody of tears. John is screaming. It is the only sound in the world. 

“I can’t believe God would ever,” Aziraphale says, and stops, and his face is twisted in anguish, “I mean - this is so awful. There must be a good purpose behind it. There  _ must.”  _

_ Otherwise what is there?  _

“He truly loved him,” Crowley says softly. “And now he’s dead. What will John do now?”

He can’t wait to hear Aziraphale’s answer - he doesn’t think he can bear it. It’s the work of a second to slip into the skin of a snake, the animal Eve loved the most, and to slither away under the scrubby apple tree clinging to sand to survive. 

☼

** _14th February 1212, Cologne_ **

“This is foolish,” says Crowley. He doesn’t have to look to know Aziraphale is beside him. 

“Crowley-”

“They are  _ children,  _ Aziraphale!”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, and he sounds broken. He’s dressed like a German shepherding man, this time, and it oddly fits with Crowley, dressed as he is like a minor noblewoman from the Rhineland. They blend into the crowd here, listening to the child Nicholas speak, shaking his tiny fist in the air. Encouraging his crowd to war. 

The cheers are high-pitched, because not a single voice among them has broken. The crowd must be thousands strong,  _ tens  _ of thousands, all whipped up into holy fervour by the dreams of one child, and now they’re going to march to war. 

“They are children,” Crowley hisses. “You can’t talk to me about the ineffable plan. Not  _ now.  _ Don’t have the gall to speak to me about that.” 

“Come with me,” Aziraphale says. His hand wraps around Crowley’s, like they did at Golgotha, and holds him tight. “I can’t do anything, and I can’t watch any longer.”

Aziraphale miracles them away to a quiet mountain in the southern part of the world, somewhere that will be found by Columbus in a little bit, somewhere that the native people call only  _ home.  _ This mountain is remote, tall, and huge trees spread their branches over the top of it, casting shadows that protect the pair of them from the watchful eyes of the sun. 

As soon as Crowley balances himself from the miracle performed, Aziraphale is letting go of him and pressing his hands to his eyes. “They’re all so young,” he’s shouting, and he sounds angry. “So young! What do they  _ know  _ of the Holy Land!”

It almost frightens Crowley - he’s used to Aziraphale explaining it all away, calling it ineffable, saying it’s part of the Plan, and to have this - 

This uncertain Aziraphale - 

Crowley’s heart aches for something he’ll never deserve. 

“Angel,” he says, and catches Aziraphale by the wrists, prying his hands away from his eyes, “Aziraphale - oh, don’t. Please don’t.”

Aziraphale’s eyes are rimmed in red. “They’re all going to die,” he whispers. “What are we going to do?”

Crowley doesn’t say there’s nothing they can do, because Aziraphale surely knows that, and it would hurt too much to say. He just keeps holding Aziraphale, underneath a wide and spreading tree, and curses Above and Below until he’s sure to be blue in the face, until he can curse no more. 

He doesn’t know when they sink to the ground, only that they do, and Crowley can do nothing but sit as Aziraphale wipes wet eyes on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” he sniffs. “I never meant for this to happen.”

“You had nothing to do with it,” Crowley says, and he says it as though it’s fact. 

(Although in truth, he’s had very little to do with Aziraphale this past decade; he just assumes, and knows he’s right to do so, that Aziraphale would never do anything that would lead to something like this.) 

“But he’s doing it in the name of God,” Aziraphale’s voice sounds wet. 

“Angel,” Crowley says, and cynicism makes a home in his heart even though he doesn’t mean it to, “You know as well as I do that God has nothing to do with what happens down here.”

He sits, and lets the angel wring himself dry of the tears. All the same - it is a long time before they go back to Europe. 

☼

** _in between, always, everywhere _ **

Crowley learns from humanity, the lessons he’s been taught himself since before time began.  _ Love is patient, love is kind…  _ love is cruel, love is blind. He and Aziraphale meet and tangle, and hold hands, and once Aziraphale holds him by the cheeks and kisses him drunkenly on the forehead. They are wrapped together, and the world seems far too small to hold the both of them. 

Crowley  _ loves  _ him. Nothing more, nothing less. 

Aziraphale is beautiful, and in his laugh and his smile and the crinkle of his eyes Crowley finds a very particular peace. He can live without having the love returned, so long as he gets to exist around him.

He tells jokes, and he likes fine wine, and he reads poetry, and he never stumbles on quotations when he’s drunk. He goes very fast and very slow, all the time, flitting from country to country and then staying in one village for a hundred years. He does good deeds and bad deeds, and when he sees Crowley after a long absence, his eyes soften and his mouth opens and he says  _ oh my dear, i’m so glad to see you!  _ and something inside Crowley’s chest grabs him tight. Holds him. Vice-like, it says You Love Him and stubbornly Crowley refuses to listen. 

Love is patient, love is kind. Crowley watches Aziraphale eat, watches him flirt, watches him be as cruel and dismissive as the harsh sting of a winter morning, watches him pour blessings like water to a flame, and watches all the while. 

Nothing more, nothing less. 

☼

** _5th October 1589, Cornwall_ **

The wedding isn’t a very happy one. Crowley hovers in the crowd, wrapped in his shawls, and watches the bride walk down the gravel path to the church, her face stormy, the bruise on her cheek stroking the skin there like the kiss of a mother. The groom is inside, and walking with a limp. 

This far South, the Romans and the Christians after them were pretty successful in wiping clean the slate of Celtic spirit, which Crowley finds quite a shame. He always enjoyed the spirituality of the druids, the manic chanting, the  _ fun  _ behind the myths - but he can’t quite complain, either, because the Celts haven’t quite as much fear of demons as the Christians. The Celts would have befriended him. 

Still, in Cornwall the old ways cling on a little, and the wedding is between two peasants without a single bean to their name, and no need to care about the Christian path. The couple are Bakerson, Robert and Millie, and they are marrying through an arrangement with their parents, so somebody can inherit the small village bakery and the farm that goes with it. The Bakersons are a wealthy family. 

“Poor girl,” says a voice in Crowley’s ear, and before Crowley can jump Aziraphale’s hand grabs his wrist. “It’s only me, dear.”

“Aziraphale,” Crowley manages. “I-”

“She was in love with the tinker,” Aziraphale says sadly. He’s wearing the clothes of a travelling gentleman, and looks quite out of place in a crowd of peasants and their cousins; all the same, nobody looks at him twice. A simple miracle. 

“I know.”

“He was in love with the bootboy.”

“I  _ know,”  _ Crowley says again. An odd bitterness fills him. “I’ve been here for almost ten years, angel - I know these people. I was trying to let her run away with the thrice-damned tinker, much good it did them, and the bootboy was never meant to get cold feet.”

“Temptation,” Aziraphale says disapprovingly. 

“I tempted them to nothing,” Crowley says. The church bells ring. “I only tempted them to forget the wills of their parents and do what their hearts told them, and look what that got me.”

“Honour thy father and mother,” Aziraphale quotes. In his mouth the commandment sounds soft and gentle, like something to encourage. 

Crowley feels ill. He is gone before Robert and his new bride emerge, glowering in the light of a new day, although Mr Fell stays in the village a while longer, and for a long time their little community is blessed with incredible good fortune - the travelling tinker man stays several months, next time he visits. Miss Crow, though, is never seen in the place again, and rumour has it she was herself a spurned lover, and something happened between her and the fine gentleman. Mr Fell will never confirm nor deny, but he looks awfully sad when she’s brought up. 

☼

** _1st December 1801, London _ **

They are drinking in Aziraphale’s bookshop - drinking rather expensive wine - and Crowley is so, so tired. 

He gets like this sometimes. Tired of existing maybe, without a break since the world first began, tired of loving Aziraphale for so long and knowing this is all he’ll ever get in return, tired of living in a world that was never designed for him to exist in. This is why sleep is the only real human indulgence he goes in for. He needs to  _ rest.  _

“You need to drink,” Aziraphale hiccups, and splashes more wine into the cup in Crowley’s hand. “You look so cold, my dear, you need to drink!” 

“I don’t really think I do,” Crowley says, but he does as he’s told. Does what Aziraphale wants. 

(Hah!)

They’re drinking a very fine whisky; Crowley’s spent a lot of time in Scotland, and has developed quite the taste for it, orange fire down his throat. It burns. Aziraphale doesn’t like it as much, says he prefers the wine and port and drink of southerly places, but Crowley likes alcohol made only to keep you warm at night. Either freeze, or drink fire. Either way you end up dead. 

Aziraphale winces when he next takes a drink, but he doesn’t say anything. Crowley watches him out of the corner of his eye, as he always does, otherwise he’d miss it. 

The bookshop is a new addition, one that has arrived since the last time Crowley saw Aziraphale - although that was a very long time ago, almost half a century. Seventeen-sixty-three, when Aziraphale had been sent by heaven across the water to one of those continents untouched by human hands yet, when Crowley decided to wander over to Ireland on sabbatical. Fat lot of good that had done him. United Irishmen? Hah. 

But the bookshop suits Aziraphale down to the ground, it does. He’s always been a lot more rooted to places than Crowley, who prefers to be on the move, through the change… Aziraphale likes to pick a place and settle into it like a mother hen ruffling into a dirt bath. Cooing. Content. And this way, Aziraphale has his collection to hand without anyone trying to burn him for witchcraft, which is always a plus - considering. 

A drunk finger lands on Crowley’s knee. “Stop thinking,” says Aziraphale with the gusto of the happily tipsy. “You think too much. Stop it.”

“I can’t help but think,” Crowley says, even as he takes another deep slug of the whisky. 

“Ridiculous. Should be against the law.”

“Thinking?”

Aziraphale nods. “Precisely.”

But none of this helps the fact that Crowley is still so very tired, and all he wants to do is sleep for a hundred years. He wants to stop loving Aziraphale. It hurts too much, and even more because he knows there is no reward - there is no breaking point, no place he can hit that makes everything alright. He just loves and sinks and keeps loving and sinking, and Aziraphale shines with all the brilliance of a thousand suns and that’s all Crowley will ever be, right up until the end of the world. 

“Angel,” he says, and then stops, shocked at how cracked and broken his voice sounds. “Aziraphale.”

Aziraphale looks briefly alarmed. “My dear boy-”

“I’m very tired,” Crowley says, a little lamely. “Do you mind if I skip out on the after-drinks?”

“No, no, but-”

“I’m tired,” Crowley says again. 

None of this helps that, even in the breaking point, he knows he’ll never stop loving Aziraphale. This is as low as he’ll ever go, and even then - 

And even then - 

It never ends. 

☼

** _the first day of the rest of the world, London_ **

“Where did you get that painting?”

Aziraphale had spent the night after the apocalypse in Crowley’s flat, where they’d shared the bed and stayed up all night, each convinced the other was asleep, wondering how on earth to proceed without making the other feel uncomfortable. Now, though, they’re in the bookshop with some tea and buns, because nothing feels more  _ solid  _ than a scone with butter and jam on the top. 

(Crowley refuses to mention which way round. He doesn’t want to anger the Cornish.) 

“What painting?” Aziraphale stops with his cup halfway to his mouth, looking a bit confused. 

“That one,” Crowley nods towards it. In truth, he recognises it well enough, even though it’s been over a hundred years since it was painted; Alfred was such a lovely man, so accommodating, and Paris in the 70s (no, not those ones) had been such a friendly place. Full of so much - newness. 

He’d only woken up to refresh himself, really, because sleeping for almost a hundred years does take it out of you, and by chance he’d wandered onto the streets of Paris and found himself in a bundle of men in black hats, all talking very excitedly about colour and light and how  _ absolutely mad  _ it was that nobody would let them in. It had all been rather fun. 

“Anthony,” Alfred had said, a little breathless, “Won’t you let me paint you? I have excellent studio light, and you beg a painting. I can see it. Please?”

“Oh, if you must,” Crowley had said, as though it meant nothing. 

It had been nice, the kisses. Very soft. Alfred loved him and didn’t seem to  _ mind  _ that his Anthony was detached, because it was Paris in the 1870s and you took what you could get and you didn’t care about the secrets everyone was hiding. It had been nice. 

So -

“Where did you get it,” Crowley asks again, in the now, after everything. 

Aziraphale looks a little flustered. “I - it was in Paris, you see, and it was almost going to be seventy-five years after I’d seen you… you remember that sleep you took, all of the nineteenth century, and I - well, one of my friends, a sort of… he was a confidant, you see, Oscar and everything, and he mentioned this delightfully odd art movement in Paris, and so I went. Sisley was very… delicate. And that awful art critic was there. And-”

“Did you ever learn who the sitter was?”

If possible, Aziraphale looks even redder. “Um. Sisley never said-”

“But you know,” Crowley says. “You recognised it.”

“I hadn’t seen you in almost a  _ century!”  _

Crowley shrugs. “I told you I was tired.”

“And then I saw you in that painting, so of  _ course  _ I was going to buy it,” Aziraphale looks almost angry at him now. “Alfred Sisley! And of course, when I asked where you’d gone he said he’d had his heart broken by you and he had no idea. I spent all that time looking for you, and then-”

“I was asleep.”

“You could have  _ told  _ me!”

“I did,” Crowley says, watching Aziraphale get more and more frantic with a sort of wild confusion, “I said I was tired, and that I was going to bed, and I’d see you in a bit. I thought… I didn’t think you’d  _ mind  _ at all, really.”

_ “Mind!” _

“Uh.”

“Of course I would  _ mind!”  _ Aziraphale doesn’t often raise his voice, never mind making the sort of shrieking yell he is now, so when he does it makes Crowley shut up and listen. “Crowley - you idiot! Of course I would mind, you frustrating, ridiculous,  _ stupid-”  _

“I did it because I was in love with you,” Crowley says. 

Silence. 

“I was in love with you and I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I went to sleep. For a long time. I thought when I woke up I would be over it.”

Silence. There’s a blob of strawberry jam on Aziraphale’s nose, where the scone he was eating had obviously proven a bit too unwieldy. 

Crowley finishes his cup of tea and sets it on the table, very deliberate, and quite loud. “And that’s the end of it,” he says, “And I hope there’ll be no more. Any scones left, or did you eat them all- _ mmf-” _

Aziraphale is not a good kisser, and neither is Crowley, because until very recently both their Head Offices looked down on immortal beings going in for sins of the flesh. That doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter at all, because they’ve both waited for far too long for it to be anything other than a good kiss. 

“L’homme distrait,” Aziraphale says breathlessly, a little while later. “I always wondered - the man, distracted by  _ what?”  _

“You shouldn’t need to ask,” Crowley says. And kisses him again, because he can. 

**Author's Note:**

> twitter: @sweetlyblue  
tumblr: @softlyblues
> 
> thanks for reading x


End file.
